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Sri Lanka World War I
World War I had only a minimal military impact on Sri Lanka,
which entered the war as part of the British Empire. The closest
fighting took place in the Bay of Bengal, where an Australian
warship sank a German cruiser. But the war had an important
influence on the growth of nationalism. The Allies' wartime
propaganda extolled the virtues of freedom and self-determination
of nations, and the message was heard and duly noted by Sri
Lankan nationalists. There was, however, an event, only
indirectly related to the war, that served as the immediate spark
for the growth of nationalism. In 1915 communal rioting broke out
between the Sinhalese and Muslims on the west coast. The British
panicked, misconstruing the disturbances as part of an
antigovernment conspiracy; they blamed the majority ethnic group
and indiscriminately arrested many Sinhalese, including D.S.
Senanayake--the future first prime minister of Sri Lanka--who had
actually tried to use his influence to curb the riots. The
British put down the unrest with excessive zeal and brutality,
which shocked British and Sri Lankan observers alike. Some
sympathetic accounts of the unrest take into consideration that
the judgment of the governor of the time, Sir Robert Chalmers
(1913-16), may have been clouded by the loss of his two sons on
the Western Front in Europe. At any rate, his actions insured
that 1915 was a turning point in the nationalist movement. From
then on, activists mobilized for coordinated action against the
British.
The nationalist movement in India served as a model to
nationalists in Sri Lanka. In 1917 the Indian National Congress
and the Muslim League mended their differences and issued a joint
declaration for the "progressive realization" of responsible
government in India. Nationalists in Sri Lanka learned from their
Indian counterparts that they had to become more national and
less partisan in their push for constitutional reform. In 1919
the major Sinhalese and Tamil political organizations united to
form the Ceylon National Congress. One of the first actions of
the congress was to submit a proposal for a new constitution that
would increase local control over the Executive Council and the
budget. These demands were not met, but they led to the
promulgation of a new constitution in 1920. Amendments to the
constitution in 1924 increased Sri Lankan representation.
Although the nationalists' demand for representation in the
Executive Council was not granted, the Legislative Council was
expanded to include a majority of elected Sri Lankan unofficial
members, bringing the island closer to representative government.
Yet the franchise remained restrictive and included only about 4
percent of the island's population.
Data as of October 1988
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